Rouhani: A Corrupt System That I Do Not Want to Name Prevents the Country from Growing

Hassan Rouhani, the President of Iran, said in a speech on Tuesday: "When you want to produce, a corrupt system that I do not want to name prevents the country from growing by allowing smuggled goods to enter. We must stop this corruption." According to Iranian news agencies, Rouhani was speaking at the inauguration of 138 construction projects across Iran on Tuesday, February 9, 2016, and did not specify the name of this 'system' or provide further details about its mechanisms and operations. He also identified "corruption and rent-seeking" as among the challenges facing the Iranian economy and added, "The government's goal is to gradually distance itself from an oil-based economy, prevent rent-seeking and corruption, and hand over the economy to the private sector." Rouhani stated that "sustainable development" can only occur in the shadow of fighting corruption and rent-seeking. He emphasized that "monopoly must be set aside, and real competition must be created." In another part of his speech, he referred to criticisms and complaints from oversight bodies, saying, "Whatever you want, we have oversight bodies that sit and only find faults, and whatever you do, they say this side was crooked or that side had a fault." He acknowledged the necessity of oversight bodies for the country but conditioned their existence on functioning within the law so that, according to Rouhani, "they allow the country to progress and help the country's advancement." Rouhani noted that the progress of the provincial approvals of the eleventh government has been 51 percent, and 70 percent of the construction budgets have been allocated this year so far. Economic experts describe the presence of security, military, and police institutions in Iran's economy as significant obstacles to economic development, the presence of a real private sector, and attracting investment. Criticism of these institutions has also existed in previous administrations, including Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the former president of Iran, who used the term "our smuggler brothers" in July 2011 to criticize unregulated imports from illegal channels, stating that they have made holes wherever they wanted to import goods into the country. At that time, experts speculated that Ahmadinejad's reference was to the economic performance of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, but Mohammad Ali Jafari, the commander of the IRGC, called those remarks a "diversionary issue." Rouhani also criticized the concentration of political, military, and economic power in one institution last year, stating: "If information, guns, money, newspapers, news agencies, and other manifestations of power are concentrated in one institution, even if it includes Abu Dharr and Salman, it will become corrupt." However, it remains unclear which institution, body, or organization Rouhani was referring to in these remarks.